We always knew Lawrence Taylor was a good bet to get in trouble. We just didn’t think he was the kind of guy to get into bad trouble. Despite being one of the most terrifying men ever to play football — in his book Over the Edge, LT hilariously talked about wanting to hit quarterbacks so hard their dicks would fall off — off the field he didn’t seem like a mean dude. He was just a person with mammoth appetites, and in his near-constant quest to get high/get laid/knock quarterbacks’ dicks off, he often crashed headlong into both the criminal-justice code and the NFL commissioner’s office.

Taylor probably single-handedly supported Pablo Escobar for much of the ’80s, and the dial-a-pimps in the Tri-State area did pretty good business with him, too, particularly in the early ’90s, after his retirement. There was a particularly dark period where LT was leading basically a vampire existence, keeping the shades drawn in his house, ordering up escorts one after another, and then venturing outside mainly to stock up on crack. In Over the Edge, he recounts one scene where he was held up in his car by a bunch of dealers for a Rolex and a pinky ring, but managed to separate one of the robbers from his gun and drive down the street with him, beating the crap out of him as he went:

I screeched to a stop and started pounding him in the face with my fists. I wasn’t scared now. “Where’s my shit?” Bam! “Gimme my shit!” Bam Bam! He just sat there, moaning like a bitch, his hands covering his bloody face. . . . The front passenger door is still open, so I grab that punk ass by the neck and shove him out of the car.

And then I went home and smoked their crack.

Taylor eventually learned to be brutally honest and often very funny about his issues — his post-rehab incarnation had a chastened exterior that seemed real. Unlike a lot of recovered athletes who pretended after they cleaned up (or found Jesus, or both) that their past drug years were one long, unbroken nightmare, LT pretty plainly admitted that he loved doing all that coke and didn’t mind the truckloads of anonymous sex, either.

He claims to have been sober for 12 years, but it kind of wasn’t surprising to find out that he’d been busted for soliciting a prostitute at a hotel in New York. What was surprising was that the alleged prostitute was a 16-year-old runaway who apparently was being pimped out by some slime ball named Rasheed Davis, who had beaten and threatened her. Reports allege that he was paying $300 to have sex with a bruised and frightened teenager — if true, that’s way off the moral map, even for him.

Right now, the case doesn’t look good. Police in Ramapo, New York, claim Taylor already admitted to paying the money and having sex with the girl. His attorney, Arthur Aidala, later refuted that claim, but it’s never good news for the defense when the police come out firing with revelations that the suspect had been cooperating before the lawyers showed up.

LET GO, METS | August 18, 2010 As difficult as this summer has been for those of us counted among the Red Sox faithful, let's all agree: it would be a hell of a lot worse to be a New York Mets fan right now.